AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 5950X, 5900X, 5800X and 5600X Tested
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 5, 2020 9:01 AM ESTGaming Tests: Borderlands 3
As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.
BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:
- 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass
BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
 |
| 95th Percentile |  |
 |
 |
 |
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
339 Comments
View All Comments
San Pedro - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Looking at 1440p min and 1080p max gaming settings, I'm thinking that for 1440p max gaming, my 2700x is still able to hang in there, even if I were to get a top end graphics card.mrvco - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Depends upon the game and what else you may doing while games (e.g. streaming, transcoding your pr0nstash, etc.), but yes, GPU performance is going to be far more important than CPU at 1440P. Hence the low resolution benchmarks in CPU reviews and higher resolution benchmarks in GPU reviews.defaultluser - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Looks like an excellent upgrade over Zeb 2 - just a bit confusing because you added the 5900X and 5950x to Bench, but you haven't added the 6 coer 8 core Zen 3.Want to do a complete comparison of my 4790k before I jump onboard (but don't want more than a 5800X) :D
anactoraaron - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Did I read that right about the memory used is ddr4 3200 but you are running it at 2133?? Because 'home users' won't change the bios to enable xmp? Did I read this wrong? I simply cannot comprehend that an enthusiast site like this would even consider taking this stance, it's as if you seem to not understand who actually reads these deep dive articles.I removed AT from my favorites bar about a month ago, when rtx 3000 was absent and new articles seemingly were just sponsored links or 'hey this thing is on sale' type of content. I was surprised to see this deep dive article and was wondering if I made a poor choice removing AT from my sources of tech content. But it appears you no longer recognize who your faithful old readers are anymore...
So home users will read the deep dive content and understand the core improvements and latency tradeoffs, but can't flick a box in the bios to enable xmp?
This reeks of intel fuckery (to keep them artificially relevant in gaming), as it is widely known that ryzen thrives - especially in gaming - using faster ram. And to do that in the desktop space this requires xmp. But hey, don't let me stop you from being the only site to run at jedec. Just know you aren't helping yourselves retain viewership/readers. I'm out, AT. Good luck in the future and Godspeed.
Icehawk - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
They repeat this mantra of "no one uses XMP" which I think is patently crazy - it is a one button change and folks who actually care about granular performance of a CPU will use it. At the very least it would be nice to see a selection of benchmarks showing scaling, if any.Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
Not really how they ever justified it but go off I guessjust4U - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
They gave the Ryzen 5000 series a gold award.. I'd say that alone shows what they think of it..Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
"Did I read that right about the memory used is ddr4 3200 but you are running it at 2133"No. To clarify, we run at the highest JEDEC-rated speed the chip supports. In the case of the Ryzen 5000 series, that's DDR4-3200.
Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
For everyone's sake, please read the article before posting an ill-informed rantTristanSDX - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Witout doubts Zen 3 is superior, but most IPC comes from large L3 cache. Also bit dissapointment, that then can not reach faster clocks for third trial, with Zen2 and Zen2 refresh (XT) before. And these prices, pretty sad.